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I promised to keep up to date with how I get on with the Nexus One. Today is actually already day three without using Apple’s phone and I’m still enjoying it. The only thing that I am really starting to miss is a decent mail client. This could potentially become a real problem.
The Nexus One […]

The Wall Street Journal just published an interesting article entitled “The Microsofting of Apple?” with their thoughts on Apple, Flash, Google and more. If you’re not subscribed to the WSJ, you can find the article on Ben Forta’s blog.
It’s refreshing to see the “old media’s” take on this… They surely make some interesting points.

There’s no denying that Apple did a terrific job with the iPhone. After walking around with PDAs and smartphones, Apple really changed the market and it took a while for competitors to catch up. I honestly never thought I would think about replacing my iPhone any time soon. Even with all its obvious flaws… But […]

Last night Google blogged about how they were experimenting with offering some videos on YouTube that support the HTML5 video tag and the H.264 codec, and that work in Chrome and Safari. This is part of TestTube, where YouTube’s engineers test out different products without rolling them into the main YouTube experience. YouTube and Flash obviously have a deep relationship. It was Flash that helped YouTube become one of the most visited sites on the Internet, and YouTube has helped increase penetration of newer versions of Flash Player by rolling out features, like H.264 support, that required the newer Flash Player versions.

There is always an undercurrent questioning if Flash is “going away” when it comes to HTML5. But I think YouTube is actually the perfect example of Flash and HTML working together. The same day Google blogged about the TestTube project, YouTube also rolled out a new rental service for some of the Sundance Film Festival videos, which is powered by Flash. And I think that shows the relationship that Flash and services like YouTube have in helping drive the web forward.

Video on the web isn’t just about watching a clip any more. There are ways to monetize it, either with advertising or by adding ways to protect content that lets people watch something after they pay. There are accessibility issues that need to be addressed like closed-captioning support. What about being able to consume video on mobile devices that don’t support the HTML5 video tag? These are all areas that Flash has found solutions to, which has helped the growth of video on the web and provided a reference for the HTML5 groups to see what works. And while there may be some arguments over the use of the H.264 codec, having Flash add support for that codec meant that companies like Google could roll out a Flash version and an HTML5 version without having to re-encode video. Flash has made possible many of the features in HTML5 by showing how good the experience can be. And Flash will continue to innovate and provide solutions to challenges on the web before those solutions can be standardized. It will remain the best way to provide cutting-edge technology to 98% of people online.

Open standards are incredibly important to the future of the web. Adobe continues to work hard to contribute to that movement and balance that with the need for our customers and developers to be able to create next-generation content that runs the same way on every operating system and device. If Flash wasn’t providing value to people, it wouldn’t be on 98% of the world’s computers and we wouldn’t see penetration for new versions reach 80% within 6 months of release.

So congrats to YouTube on the HTML5 video work. This is good for HTML and I think there will be a lot of Adobe, Flash, and HTML5 collaboration moving forward. Flash has an important role to play by providing innovative ideas and solutions for an increasingly multi-screen and multi-platform world.

The latest in our series of Flash Player 10.1 video demos comes hot on the heels of Motorola’s announcement of the Backflip, Droid and it’s Milestone variant.

You will remember that at MAX 2009 we showed a disguised Android device, previously unannounced, running Flash Player 10.1. That was in fact the Droid, and with our continued partnership with Motorola and Google it’s great to see Flash Player 10.1 start to filter through the platform. From a developer perspective, this is a good indicator that we’re now able to bring Flash to devices by platform; in this case Android 2.x.

In his video demo, Adrian shows the New York Times website which is now able to detect these Android devices and provide a more complete web experience including video, images and animations which until now have only been suited to the desktop.

Most news and entertainment sites today are using Flash to playback their video content, engaging with their audiences using rich media throughout their sites.

The award winning BBC News site is also shown in this video, and interestingly shows some nice device detection from the BBC whereby highly optimized video is sent across the web as they detect lower bandwidths using the Flash Media Server.

As with our other videos, these are teasers to give you some idea of the wide scope of devices including WebOS, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Linux that will be able to run Flash Player 10.1 later this year.

The phone is 11.5 mm deep, slightly thinner than the iPhone 3GS at 12.3 mm. It is also slightly lighter than the iPhone 130 grams v. 135 grams)……..But most of your interaction with the phone will be through the gorgeous 3.7 inch 480 x 800 OLED capacitive touchscreen. This is the best mobile phone display on the market today, blowing away the iPhone’s 480 x 320 display………This phone is also powered by the Snapdragon 1 GHz core processor, which is more than able to handle the Nexus One’s 3D graphics, multiple applications running in the background and heavy browser use simultaneously.

From the software to the hardware to the UI it sounds like this is going to be a very good phone. But it gets better. Back at MAX we announced that Google was joining the Open Screen Project. And we’ve been working closely with Google since that time to make sure that Flash Player 10.1 works well with Android devices. And we’re also working with content creators on optimizing their Flash content for the smaller screens.

CEOs from ARM, Broadcom, DoCoMo, Google, HTC, Motorola, NVIDIA, Palm, QUALCOMM, and RIM talk about how they’re bringing Flash Platform technologies to their devices and platforms as part of the Open Screen Project and why they think it’s important to have Flash on their devices and platforms.

Recently you probably noticed that I’ve been working on Android a little, and for good reason of course. Though it would be easy to focus this post on Android, let’s just look at some of the places where Google use Flash today.

Youtube

Google Maps

Site Search

Web Search

Chrome / OS

So you see Flash is everywhere at Google and we’ve been working together for years to build upon this relationship. Google joining the Open Screen Project may seem like a matter of course given our demo’s last year and given their investments in the Flash Platform.

In the past few months we’ve seen stellar device launches from HTC and Motorola using Android. Those of you with beady eyes will also have spotted others from Sony Ericsson and “others” coming down the pipe soon.

Sarah Perez over at ReadWriteWeb has a post up titled Are you Over AIR Applications in which she talks about her change in perspective on the value of AIR and how much benefit desktop applications provide over browser applications. It’s a pretty good post, and one that I hope drives some traffic and conversation, especially as we’re hearing more about things like Chrome, Firefox 3.5, and the Chrome OS.

For much of the past couple of years web applications were trying to mimic basic aspects like functionality and look and feel of desktop applications. That drove the movement towards RIAs and the shift made it painfully obvious that the browser in its current form wasn’t up to snuff. So more and more energy went into improving the browser so that web applications could compete against their entrenched desktop counterparts. We’re finally seeing releases from all that work. Firefox 3.5 looks to incorporate HTML5’s support for offline mode. Chrome was written from scratch because Google felt, basically, that the current browsers weren’t powerful enough to run complex HTML/Javascript based web applications. So what benefits does AIR have in this world? I agree that desktop applications as we know them are falling by the wayside, but AIR still has a few areas I think make it shine.

Web Technologies
One of the best parts of AIR is that it uses web technologies like HTML/Javascript and Flash. Web developers are a creative and innovative bunch. I’d argue that one of the main reasons Web 2.0 exploded the way it did was because web developers took to their destiny as the drivers of technology. Web development is relatively easy to learn but complex enough to keep the challenges coming. It’s also more productive than traditional languages because it’s both faster and it’s cross-platform. The strength of web development is a strength of AIR. Look at the first wave of a game-changing technology like Twitter. Almost all AIR applications. That’s because web technologies are easy and AIR made it very simple to quickly create a new kind of experience for a new kind of service. Tweetdeck and Twhirl got a first mover advantage and reaped the rewards. The development speed that the web allows for shouldn’t be discounted.

Notifications and Files
I think notifications, or the “toast” windows that you can pop up in AIR are more and more important as the web gets more real time. People want the firehose and they want it as soon as they can get it. Another area that I think AIR hasn’t been used enough for are filetypes. It’s incredibly powerful to be able to not only create items on the file system but to associate those with your applications. So far there hasn’t been need to create things like a .twitter file extension, but the next generation of web services may see big benefits from users being able to create those extensions. And of course with the file system you get some inherent benefits like the ability to tie into Spotlight or other desktop searches.

Ultimately I think both the browser and a more web-centric approach to desktop applications will succeed. The cross platform benefits, the improved developer productivity, and the close integration with web services are going to be instrumental in driving adoption for web applications both inside and outside of the browser. I hope AIR continues to do well and help drive innovation for web applications on the desktop. Seeing technologies like Google Gears and Titanium’s Appcelerator prove to me that the space is still growing and that we’ve got a lot of demand for a blend of web and desktop. And we’ve got a lot of enhancements coming up in the next version of AIR, so we’re not standing still. Stay tuned.

There is a three part video interview with Shantanu Narayen, Adobe’s CEO, up on FT.com today as part of their “View from the Top” series, in which they talk to CEOs about news and trends within their respective industry.
In Part 2 of the interview, the conversation is focused on the adoption of Flash on mobile […]